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Thursday, June 18, 2015

The Oldest Person I Know

For her TY Work Portfolio, Robyn Brady wrote this piece, which she also read out at the TY English Evening last month:

The Oldest
Person I Know

I don't actually know that many old
people if I’m honest. I know “of” them, like my mum's uncle, and aunt, who
I’ve heard stories of but never met in person. They’re old, possibly nearing
their 80’s. But no one can compare to my to the little old lady who lives in
the house in front of mine.

She’s a very mysterious creature.
I’ve only met her three times. The first time was when we had just moved into
our house after re-constructing it. She had the loudest dogs in the neighbourhood.
Two enormous huskies. They barked all through the day and night non-stop. There
was a little forested area between our houses at the time: it was overgrown and
unkempt, much like relationships she had with all of her other neighbours.

Not many people try to get to know
her: she isn’t pleasant on the eye, but also not unpleasant either. Her hair is mostly white, with a slight purple undertone. She keeps it under a
clear hat, but this isn’t any kind of rain hat: this one is triangular in shape
and she ties it under her chin. The skin under her eyes droops over the top of
her cheekbones.

The rest of her skin is worn with age, and she spends most of her
summers abroad, giving her the appearance of an old leather bag with cracks. The
rest of her face is very wide and bony; her jawline is speckled with hairs
that make her face look like a peach, fluffy and round. Her eyebrows are always immaculately filled in, which surprises me because her hands shake all
the time. Her neck is long and veiny, and constantly covered by her collection
of rosary beads.

She lives alone in a large two story
Victorian house. The house appears gothic to me, but it has an air
of elegance. Its large white doors tower over her when she opens the door. I
have never been inside the house but from my glimpses through the door I can
tell she is a pack rat. Boxes overflow with trinkets and clothes. Her
staircase is full of books. On a marble table beside the door sits a vase with
dead sunflowers. They areher prize and glory. In the summer she grows them
high enough for them to peek through the forested area, brightening up the dull
browns and greens. She comes out of her house everyday at the same time, just
before noon. She limps heavily to a battered red car that is covered with
cobwebs. Then she leaves her house and comes back just before the six o’clock
news.

When she talks she cocks her head to
the left, and with a monotonous voice she slides her words together. She never
shows any large amount of affection, except for two things: her dogs and her
husband. Her dogs howling incessantly causes many of the neighbourhood disputes.
One neighbour even tried to muzzle her dogs while she was out one day, which I
thought was a very forward and disrespectful act towards a woman whom these
people never got to know. This was the day that I heard her speak for the first
time. As her mouth let out a hoarse croaky gasp, her eyes were just as amazed
as ours, they slightly watered, but her bottom lip pushed up to her top lip to show
her look of despite, and her eyes turned to slits. It was possibly one of the
scariest moments of my life: her words didn’t slide into each other and as she
roared at the man who had muzzled the dogs. Steam must have been trying to come
out her ears because her face was so red. She screamed a lot of descriptive
words in between her cursing. One line I distinctly remember was: “That flaming
man will be the death of all of us.” Needless to say that man was just as
flabbergasted as we were. I was practically pushed into my house so I
wouldn’t see what happened. All I know was that the police came by.

I said she was also affectionate
towards her husband, this was towards a certain extent. He was also quite
mysterious. He had a cleft chin with a little white stringy beard. He wore big
round glasses that fell off the tip of his nose a lot. He had a very lop-sided
walk that made him look like he was limping, but it was because one leg was
shorter than the other. He left earlier than she did in the morning, and he
arrived back way after my bedtime.

The day of her husband's funeral was the
last day I saw her. She looked even older than she normally did. Her hair
wasn’t as purple and her lips were weighed down on the corners. Her wrinkles
pressed together so hard that her face couldn’t even relax. The clothes on her
shoulders just hug there aimlessly. She sat in the first pew alone. But if she
hadn’t have been sitting alone, you could still see she was alone. Her presence
was dim and unwelcoming, like she didn’t want anyone to fill the gaping hole in
her heart. She’s the oldest person I know, and I think she's the oldest person
she knows too, because with the few people that came to her
husband's funeral, I began to see why she didn’t want anyone to fill the hole
in her heart. There was only one person who could.